Gerda Panofsky-Soergel

Gerda S. Panofsky

The book consists of four studies on the famous Russian writer and historian, who lived from 1766-1826, and his connections with Germany. In 1789 Karamzin did not only visit various German towns and monuments, but also interview philosophers and men of letters like Kant, Nicolai, Herder or Wieland. The episodes from his LETTERS OF A RUSSIAN TRAVELER have been widely dismissed as fictional. However, as this author can show, archival records and even contemporary newspapers prove that Karamzin did not invent anything. On the contrary his epistles turn out to be an invaluable source of knowledge, for instance on the conditions of Russians, temporarily or permanently living at the time in Prussia, in particular Berlin and Potsdam. By a strange twist of history, several of Karamzin's autographs have found their way back to Germany, above all to the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the very library the young Karamzin had borrowed a volume from more than two centuries before. These papers (aside from an earlier autograph of 1789 in Nurnberg) range from 1806 till 1821 and are commented upon in the last part of the present publication.

Fiction as Facts

Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin in Germany

Suger (Abbot of Saint Denis)

Abbot Suger

This revised edition incorporates the additions and corrections recorded by Erwin Panofsky until the time of his death in 1968. Gerda Panofsky-Soergel has updated the commentary in the light of new material, and the bibliography that she has prepared reflects the scholarship on St.-Denis in the last three decades. She has obtained some additional and more recent photographs, and the illustrations include a new ground plan and a new section of the chevet of the Abbey Church, both drawn under the supervision of Sumner McKnight Crosby.

Gerda Panofsky-Soergel

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